Arguing that whether language shapes reality or not, it is always a political or politicized tool, the author first describes how European and European-influenced languages, ever since the first arrival of white imperialists in South Africa, have served as explicitly politicized institutions in that country and how conscientious Afrikaans writers in South Africa today - whether they are black or white - have to cope with the dilemma of either writing in a language polluted with the content and forms of apartheid or writing in a foreign language. Then the author compares a new group of white Afrikaans 'dissident' writers from the 1980s, the 'Tagtigers', with the white Afrikaans writers from the 1960s, the Sestigers, who revitalized Afrikaans literature. In formal terms, the work of the 'Tagtigers' was as experimental as that of the Sestigers, but it was also more explicitly politicized than the early Sestigers' work. The author argues that these oppositions (Sestigers vs. 'new' writers, experimentalists vs. traditionalists, conservatives vs. dissidents, and so on) are not as stable as they were once thought to be. He illustrates this argument with reference to an unusual publication of the mid-1980s that confounded expectations and unfixed categories: 'Somer II: 'n plakboek', by André Letoit (1985). Bibliogr., notes.